Terry Marotta: The science project

I stood in Aisle 10B of the crafts store with a high school student bent on building two human arms complete with hands and fingers.

Terry Marotta

I stood in Aisle 10B of the crafts store with a high school student bent on building two human arms complete with hands and fingers.

He would then accompany this vivid display of dismemberment with dense and complicated passages of prose explaining the physiology of the nerves involved but I had no part in any of that; I was only the ride.

I will admit though: When the call came asking for help getting to the craft store I dropped everything, because really, didn’t school projects furnish the most cliff-hanging and hilarious dramas in my own kids’ lives? I think of the project on Native American myths where my little girl used our pet hamster, dressing it up as much a possible as a chipmunk. I think of my own Ancient History project back in junior high when my best friend and I tried making a model of the Great Sphinx at Giza.

So 20 minutes after getting there we both stood, in the Modeling Compounds aisle of the crafts store and just being in the presence of the appropriate materials seemed to fill us both with a kind of giddy optimism.

“Look! 10 pound bags of plaster of Paris! Get three just in case!

“Look! Kits for making a model of the human hand! Get two and we’ll stick them on the end of each arm!”

All these things did we buy and more besides, and went home happy.

I was happy anyway, since all I had ahead was supper and a little TV and a nice early bedtime.

I thought all was well for him too - until a dire second call came in a day later.

The compound wasn’t setting up right; the arms looked nothing like arms.

And that’s when I remembered: the plaster of Paris on my sphinx hadn’t set up either! My friend and I bought bag after 10-pound bag of the stuff and still the beast had this little shrinking pinhead and hips that just kept on growing each night in my cellar…

While we did our Algebra homework and ate our simple suppers;

While we slept in our girlhood beds.

Wider and wider the sphinx-body grew, pooling and creeping like lava-flow. By the time we got done adding to it I’ll bet it weighed a good 80 pounds.

All this flashed through my mind as we stood once again in good old Aisle 10B, scanning the shelves and considering the problem.

We stood there for ten, 15, 20 minutes.

Then suddenly I remembered: I save skeletons! I love skeletons! And wouldn’t this store carry those big bags of fiberfill you use for stuffing pillows? And also yarn to act as nerves?

So bags of puffy stuff it was, and yarn, and poster board too; also, rolls of bandages from the drug store and we were SET.

Two hours later we had wrenched the arms from the torso of my favorite little skeleton and padded them with an exquisite layering of fiberfill “muscles” held in place by a great winding of bandages.

I even went and got some of my knee-high pantyhose and encased the arms like two fat sausages in the L’eggs® company’s inimitable Suntan hue.

Ecstatic myself, I saw a good day’s work.

The student saw an all-nighter and then some.

Why?

Because for him the great challenge still lay ahead. It was the challenge of how to convey in mere words the intricate and divine engineering that lets our bones or the bones of Adam’s brethren, simply and miraculously…. get up and dance.

Write to Terry either at terrymarotta@verizon.net or c/o Ravenscroft Press, P.O. Box 270, Winchester, MA 01890 or in the “comments” section of her daily blog Exit Only at www.terrymarotta.worpdress.com.